Researchers from Europe have developed a solar simulator that replicates the heat and light of the sun’s radiation—and then some. The system, with a luminous flux equivalent to over 20,000 suns, is being used to test various materials in extreme conditions.

Lasers are behind so much of our cutting-edge technology. Now scientists at the University of Michigan have successfully shown that is possible to build a working laser with blood, the better to spot tumors in the human body.

Rembrandt was renowned for his masterful use of light and dark contrasts, and the precise proportions in his paintings and etchings. Now a British artist claims the 17th century painter likely used combinations of mirrors and lenses to project images onto a drawing surface to create them—especially his famous…

These beetles may look like two different species, but they’re the same individual. The difference lies in how they were photographed, using a new lens that allows scientists to “see” one of the most fundamental properties of biology: chirality.

The Internet is a wonderful place. Case in point: there’s an entire YouTube channel called Let’s Melt This, devoted to videos of, well, stuff melting. In the latest installment, the team placed two pennies under a Fresnel lens to see how long it would take for them to melt under the concentrated heat of the sun.

Want to make sure you back something up indefinitely? Then you could do worse than a digital data storage technique that uses laser light to store 360 terabytes of information on nanostructured quartz for up to 14 billion years.

A team of researchers has achieved the fastest ever transmission rate for digital information between a single transmitter and receiver, sending data optically at a frankly ridiculous 1.125 terabits per second.

‘Image enhance’ just got a little more real, for microscopes at least. A team of researchers form UCLA has developed a new sensor and software that turns an optical microscope into a super-resolution imaging device.

Many have savored the arresting visual beauty of Raphael’s “Madonna del Prato” (1505). Now you can listen to it as well, thanks to a new series by Athens-based artist and physicist Yiannis Kranidiotis, who transformed this and other classic paintings into haunting digital soundscapes.

Who doesn’t love a surprise at this time of year? Well, researchers from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in France certainly do, so they’ve created a new kind of inkjet printing technique that produces images that appear different depending on the viewing angle.

A company called EnChroma has built a pair of glasses that claims to restore color vision for the colorblind. Predictably, the internet has erupted with excitement. But it’s not the first instance in which a piece of technology has made this bold assertion, and the science behind color perception isn’t…

How do you trap light inside something that’s filled with holes? That may sound like an odd question, but it’s one that researchers have been grappling with to create a new kind of microscopic container that locks light in but lets fluids pass straight through.

With the future of computing looking increasingly likely to become light-based, it pays to work out how to make the switching of light as efficient as possible. Enter tiny silicon discs, which have now been shown to be the fastest ever optical switches at the nanoscale.